At BtoB Magazine’s NetMarketing Breakfast, I was struck by how many of the questions were about Web metrics. Are marketing metrics becoming trendy?
These are not the good old days. Time was, you got a hundred marketers together and they talked about target segments, ad buys, demographics—the nuts and bolts of delivering your message. But times have changed. The biggest change ushered in by the Internet has not been banner ads, affiliate marketing, or even search marketing—it’s metrics-based marketing.
Direct Marketing used to be an arcane specialty in marketing that few pursued and fewer mastered. Response rates, A/B split runs—Direct Marketers learned to experiment. Test and measure. Refine everything looking for every slight improvement.
But the Internet has made almost everyone a Direct Marketer, not in the sense that every Web site offers e-Commerce, but rather than all Web marketers take the Direct Marketing approach of test and measure. Click through rates, traffic, conversions. We are measuring everything, but are we really taking on the Direct Marketing mindset? Are you relentlessly tuning your content? Do you know whether your changes improve conversion rates?
Join the trendsetters and learn to think like a Direct Marketer. Marketing is becoming metrics-driven—not the flabby customer satisfaction or brand attribute metrics that we know, but a scientific way to maximize your return on investment.
